Medical imaging refers to a variety of different techniques that may be used to create visual representations of interior regions of a patient's body. Medical imaging techniques—including but not limited to computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance (MR), positron emission tomography (PET), single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) data, and the like—may be used to reveal internal structures that would otherwise be concealed by a patient's skin and/or bones, and to diagnose and/or treat disease.
As a result of the extreme variation that may occur in patient body shapes, body sizes, clothing, and the like, a technician operating a medical imaging scanner may be faced with the difficult task of trying to determine, roughly, the hidden location of an internal organ or region of interest in a patient, and then manually positioning the patient such that the region of interest is optimally positioned with respect to the scanner. The manual patient positioning process is time-consuming and costly.
One approach suggested by Sebastian Bauer et al. to improve the manual patient positioning process in radiation therapy has been to use motion-sensing input devices (e.g., Microsoft Kinect) for coarse initial patient setup verification and alignment. However, this approach involves aligning the patient on a table based on a previously obtained CT scan in the diagnostic phase. Thus, a prior medical imaging scan (e.g., which may have already necessitated some degree of manual patient positioning) is a prerequisite to this approach.